I despise when the media distorts the truth with statistics by misrepresenting mere correlation as causation.  It is a mistake of grand magnitude in statistics to do so, but so often the media and even worse the Government perpetuates statistically irrelevant information to the public.  Let me point out some glaring issues with the statement, “Speed Kills”.

The French TGVs are some of the fastest trains in the world, not having killed a single passenger in their entire history.  The Shikansen travels over 180mph every single day carrying hundreds of thousands of people in Japan.  In Germany the Autobahn is home to many of the fastest drivers in the world, traveling over 130mph and sometimes reaching 180-200mph while driving the system.  All of these modes of transport either have no fatalities or are vastly lower in fatalities than our Interstate System is.  Which if you take those things into account, “Speed Kills” isn’t just incorrect, it is an outright lie.

On US roads speed isn’t the culprit, inattention and almost nonexistent training is the killer, rooted in the core cause of people not knowing, not paying attention, and being ill prepared for an incident of any sort.  US drivers don’t understand car balance, driving dynamics, weight distributions of their vehicles, all things which make driving safer or more dangerous depending on the level of knowledge.  The US, simply, has completely unskilled in incapable drivers.  Meanwhile Germany maintains a much higher skill level, a smaller amount of traffic, and provides vastly superior alternatives to driving – all which contribute to a lower fatality rate.  This same thing applies to France, Japan, and other developed nations.

So stop lying, your parents told you not to as a child and you shouldn’t now.

This is a public service announcement via the Transit Sleuth.  Please, do us all a favor and provide real information, factual correlations, and accurate causations.  Fear inducing false causes and incorrect correlations do no one any good and absolutely does NOT help provide solutions to a problem.

If you are a policy maker, stop focusing on speeds and start focusing on training, licensing, and eliminating wreckless drivers from the roadways.  A focus on ticketing speeding will do at best a minimum of good and at worst it will drive more regular people to drive and behave dangerously as the laws get more disconnected from the reality of the roads.

The 101

Transit has throughout history been directly tied; either through profits, funding, or other mechanisms to land development and the growth of cities.  Even today the more urban cities, that maintain a night life, human element, and a penchant for growth all have a distinct transit element that grows larger by the year.  There was a short segment of time during the mid 20th century where transit services saw a lag in use.  But those years are now long gone and transit is seeing a resurgence as a way to mitigate the destruction of cities and instead breath new life into cities, culture, and other positive features of cities.

With the new administration putting a little more focus on real city growth, intelligent zoning, restructuring the car centric maze of roads into or at least in addition to human oriented cities we’re seeing growth in transit discussions and opportunities.  The future, in this regard for cities and their inherent generation of wealth, increased standards of living, and cultural history looks much better than it did over the last 50+ years.

Albeit we’re giving up a lot of other things for this new life, but that is for a different discussion.

Transit Futures

With that said I’d like to look to the future.  Currently we have a lot of sprawl that continues on a daily basis to drain billions of dollars form general budgets and feed it directly into foreign growth, foreign oil purchases, and depletes our internal valuations of all sorts of things, which most notable is our currency wealth generation.  This sprawl devalues human involvement in our world, pushing us aside for the modes of transport we use – namely the personal automobile.  This  mode of transport, heavily subsidized in hundreds of ways both directly and indirectly, has been sold via dubious means as a private industry, free-market creation.  It is however, anything but.  However it has created a massive hurdle to creating interconnected, human scale, comfortable, livable, and culturally vibrant cities.

With the connection of cities, internally and externally to cities, becoming a more desired focal point in politics and slowly in private industry again some key points are being brought up time and time again.

• What is actually efficient, price competitive, and won’t significantly drag on our future generations.  In other words, what can we build that provides logistical movement of peoples without bankrupting our nation, our future, and our children’s future.  According to most sources we’re somewhere in the range of $1-16 Trillion behind in transportation infrastructure investment compared to China, Europe, and even Russia.  This includes highway, rail, and other infrastructure.  The question is, how do we fund it, how do we make the money for it?
• How can we bulk up movement and travel in corridors between close cities without excessively expensive highways, Interstates, and Airports?  This leaves the absurdly obvious answer of passenger rail.  The nit picking then starts about what kind, how much, how fast, and where is the money for this also?
• Highways, Interstates, and roadways in most cities are at their peak many hours of the day and increasingly this is becoming the standard operation of roadways.  Roadways don’t pay for themselves in the least, and many states are looking at privatization, tolling, and congestion pricing to find money to pay for these existing roads, new prospective roads, and other solutions.  Currently the other question is how to expand road capacity without destroying further neighborhoods and the ever unpopular eminent domain.

There are other points that keep coming up, but these are the main ones I keep seeing.  The recurring theme of all these points is funding.  Where can we, as a nation and peoples, come up with the money for this need & desire for better, more reliable, and more capable transportation?  I have two proposals for this, which have been mentioned many times in blogs and other places, but I’m going to tie these together since many are just suggested separately.

1. A national policy… elaborate…  or no national policy & increased focus on specific areas.

2. Private investment vehicles & interest generation.  Without this, there will NEVER be enough money in the industry to really build out like the nation desires and wants.